FROM

The hope of BeFairBeVegan is that we will help people to see that the
casualties of this relentless massacre are complex beings, with faces,
feelings, and families.

On Monday November 6th, the BeFairBeVegan campaign went live in Cleveland
with powerful displays in eight central locations, intended to confront and
challenge the pervasive notion of human supremacy.
In August of 2016, BeFairBeVegan created a stir in the animal advocacy
world, by releasing a powerful series of uncompromisingly vegan displays
throughout New York City, including a stunning moving billboard in the
middle of Times Square, one of the highest profile locations in the world.

These powerful images caused the campaign’s Facebook page to grow from zero
to 10,000 in under four weeks, and to triple in the 14 months since, as well
as eliciting responses from celebrities such as actor and Academy Award
nominee Joaquin Phoenix, who was quoted in AlterNet as saying the following:

“In addressing our speciesist attitudes toward other animals, BeFairBeVegan
encourages us to consider that our core similarities are far deeper than our
surface differences. Now more than ever, the world needs to hear this
message.”

Having since gone live in both Tasmania and Connecticut, and poised to
expand into multiple other locations around the world in the coming year,
BeFairBeVegan introduces viewers to the faces and feelings of the animals we
use, while inviting us to consider the true nature of the human-nonhuman
power imbalance.

These arresting billboards (along with other striking visuals on the BFBV
Facebook page) encourage us to see our victims for who they really are:
sentient beings to whom we — far from being the caring custodians we like to
imagine ourselves to be — are persecutors blinded by bigotry to the true
nature of fellow animals, and addicted to the benefits we receive from
defending, despite all evidence to the contrary, our own supremacy.

As stated by Joanna Lucas, the campaign’s creator:

“We cling to the self-aggrandizing image of ourselves as the superior
species, and to our position of absolute power over all other animals on
Earth. We want to maintain this unbridgeable divide between us and nonhuman
individuals at all costs. Our use of products extracted from the bodies of
others is not about necessity, but about fulfilling desires as trivial as
taste, habit, profit, or convenience. At a deeper level, it seems to be more
about the daily affirmation of our delusion of supremacy.”

Campaign Spokesperson Angel Flinn states:

“With all our sincere discussion and genuine concern for the rights of
oppressed groups of humans, not one is dominated and tyrannized to a degree
that even compares with the way we persecute our nonhuman brethren, who are
ignored and ridiculed as much by the progressive left as by the conservative
right. As the disposable victims of a global system of brutal oppression,
the lives of billions of other animals the world over are a dystopia, from
the degrading ways in which their parents are forced to conceive them, to
their terrifying, humiliating deaths when they are still, for the most part,
young adults or children.”

The hope of BeFairBeVegan is that we will help people to see that the
casualties of this relentless massacre are complex beings, with faces,
feelings, and families. We reduce these individuals to consumable goods, and
they all end their lives in bewilderment and terror at our hands. Contrary
to popular belief, this does not just apply to those used for meat, or on
factory farms, but is equally true of those in free-range/cage-free/organic
facilities, in the dairy, egg, and wool industries, and in all other
branches of the animal trade.

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